by Anna Bright
“I’m right here,” Cobie protested, sitting back on her knees. Both of us shushed her.
Anya’s wrists were scraped and abraded from the shackles she still wore, but she was an excellent fighter. I’d never seen Cobie fight, but I’d seen the friendly grip she kept on her knife, and I knew she was strong.
But I had also seen the eyes of the court on Anya when we arrived, and that was what had decided for me.
I worked at a congealed patch of blood on the floor, fighting back nausea. “This wasn’t about who was the better fighter,” I finally replied.
Anya said nothing, only scrubbed harder, her chains clanking against the floor.
“You’re the prinsessa from the North, and the Wolves hate the Shield,” I pressed. “What if the tsarytsya or the generals had used that to start something with the crowd? Or to pit you against someone unbeatable? It would have been a hundred times worse for you out there. They would be delighted to watch you fall.”
“She’s right,” Cobie said. “No one knows who I am. They’ll fight me, but they won’t hate me.”
Anya winced as the lye soap burned her ruined wrists. “Of course Selah is right,” she said flatly. “I am still angry.”
The three of us watched each other for a long moment. “I was never angry, before,” I finally said, swallowing. “Now it feels like I’m angry all the time.”
Cobie, Anya, and I cleaned the blood from the floor and the walls, but it clung to our hands and knees when we were done.
I wanted nothing more than to bathe myself and burn the rags we’d used. But we found our way down the stairs blocked again.
I was beginning to believe Baba Yaga was everywhere.
We drew against the railing, hoping she would continue climbing and we could carry on. But she stepped close to me—too close. The diamonds in her stolen crown winked at me. “Do you think you’re special, Selah, seneschal-elect?”
I stiffened. “No, moya tsarytsya.” The honorific was bitter in my mouth.
“You are.” She climbed up one, two steps, until she could lean over me. “You are the girl in a story.”
My limbs shook as I lifted my eyes to hers. “There are many girls in many stories.”
Baba Yaga laughed. “True. But only heroines are tested.”
I shook my head. “Am I being tested?” I didn’t know what she meant. I didn’t know what she wanted. Cobie and Anya hesitated behind me. The book I’d stolen hours ago screamed out in the silence from its place in Cobie’s basket.
“Vasylysa was tested, too,” Baba Yaga said, narrowing her eyes. “Once upon a time. Her stepmother sent her to a town over the border called Medved, bearing nothing more than a sack of potatoes with which to make trade, and told her to come back with all they and their neighbors needed. It was training, she said, for her future as the leader of her village.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what she was talking about, or why she continued to harp on the story of a girl in the kitchens I’d hardly spoken to.
Was the girl a particularly hated prisoner? Was she kin to Baba Yaga, some kind of spy? What was the tsarytsya trying to tell me?
“And did she?” I asked.
Baba Yaga scoffed. “Of course she didn’t.” She pushed past me up the stairs, making for her chambers. “She was captured, just as you were.”
41
Aleksei descended to the kitchens that afternoon. “Do you have your knife?” he asked Cobie, with no preamble.
She didn’t look at him. “What do you care?”
“I want you to have a fair chance.” Aleksei crossed his arms, shifting uncomfortably.
“Why the full moon?” I demanded. “And what’s happening on the eclipse?”
“Zatemnennya?” Aleksei shrugged, abstract. “It’s a lunar eclipse, one month from now. It’s . . . significant. Busy, and bordering on religious, I think.”
Anya dropped the dish she’d been washing. It clattered in the sink. A few of the maids and cooks glanced over, concerned, then dropped their gazes quickly at the sight of Rankovyy in their midst.
“And what will you be doing tonight, Aleksei?” Anya asked, expression hard.
“Seeing to the little pestykk.” His eyes darted away, guilty.
“To the children?” Anya fired back at him. “To the children she calls her little pestles, who will grind those who resist into dust? The children she’s indoctrinated?”
“Every member of the pestykk comes of their own volition,” Aleksei said, righteously indignant.
“We’ve all seen that there’s only one answer when the tsarytsa asks a question,” I said, pitching my voice low. “Besides, there are some choices children can’t make.”
“They choose what you were spared!” Anya raged. I put out a hand to quiet her, but she was not to be soothed. “You were allowed to grow up happy and free with a family. We were taught discipline, humility, hard work—in safety.”
At this, Aleksei finally seemed to grow frustrated. “And I will teach these children the same!”
“Can you teach them justice?” Anya demanded. “When the tsarytsya tells her people that they will never grow hungry, because the whole world is theirs to eat? That whatever they can take belongs to them by right, because that is the way of Wolves? Can you teach them kindness, when the tsarytsya tells them that the world is brutal and their teeth and claws must be kept sharp?”
“How do you know—?” Aleksei began.
“Because I ran from it!” Anya shouted. “Because she came for Varsinais-Suomi and killed my parents and changed our country’s name! Because I looked over my shoulder while I ran, and I saw—I saw—what she did.” Anya was breathing hard, a vein in her forehead pulsing.
“Anya.” Aleksei swallowed, face looking drawn in the dim kitchens. “I have a place, and I’m proud of it. I have power now. I can use it to help you.”
A few nights before, I’d fallen asleep by the fire, thinking about how the kings and the fae and the gods of the old stories rewarded the good, the brave, the kind.
I hadn’t let myself think that night of who else they sometimes seemed to reward.
It was not only the virtuous, the generous, the hospitable, the humble.
Sometimes fools and liars won the day. Sometimes con men’s tricks succeeded.
Sometimes the wolves were sated, and the innocent were lost.
“If you are proud of this, then you are not the brother I knew, and I don’t want your help,” Anya bit out. “I never wanted to draw lines between us. But if you can’t see how horrible this is—the things she wants to teach them, the things you are going to help teach them—then I don’t know who you are anymore.”
Aleksei’s face hardened, and he paused for a long moment before tugging a knife from his waistband and passing it hilt-first to Cobie. “Take this, anyway.”
Vasylysa and another pair of maids saw her take it from his hands. But I saw from their looks that they would say nothing. As they said nothing of Wash’s prayers, or of mine. As they must have taken in Vasylysa herself after she failed her stepmother’s “testing.”
I’d never seen Anya cry before. But after Aleksei left, tears began to roll down her cheeks.
And dread took shape inside me, pale and sharp as the light of the full moon on a blade.
42
We heard the masses beneath the full moon before we saw it in the skies above.
It was nearly ten at night when Anya and I trailed Cobie and her guards up the stairs and out the front door. A crowd filled the white-lit courtyard before Baba Yaga’s house, soldiers and commoners and—my stomach dropped—hundreds of children in military uniforms. They stood in ranks to the side of an open circle in the courtyard, arms rigid at their sides, chins high.
The guards hauled Cobie to one side of the circle, and the crowd swallowed Anya and me. My panic swelled as we were pushed away; the need to go back and protect Cobie was a hook in my gut.
Fear pounded in my veins. What if I�
�d picked wrong? What if this ring—empty now but for the cold light of the moon—broke Cobie in some way I couldn’t fix or take back?
I couldn’t handle any more guilt.
“We need to get back to her,” Anya panted. “I want to talk strategy. I want to watch some fights and help her decide what tack she’ll take.”
“Yes,” I agreed at once. This would help. We could still help Cobie.
We shouldered and shoved our way back toward her, pushing through the hordes of men, ignoring wolf whistles and sly comments and slapping away wandering hands. Someone spilled a glass of beer down Anya’s shift, and she turned to snarl at its bearer—then quickly falsified a broad, flirtatious smile.
“Ivan?” she chirped.
“Ivan?” his friends mimicked, jostling him and laughing. A flush crept from Ivan’s neck to his peach-fuzz hairline. They all smelled sour, like too much alcohol and unwashed uniforms.
They scared me. I wanted to hide.
But gears were turning behind Anya’s doe eyes. She pointed to Cobie, leaning close to Ivan. He nodded, then draped an arm over Anya’s shoulder. I was impressed that she didn’t shrug him off at once.
“What did he say?” I muttered, leaning close to her.
“He’ll take us to her in a minute—the first fight’s about to start,” she whispered.
I looked around for soldiers getting ready for a match, but the tsarytsya moved instead to the ranks of the little pestykk. Aleksei moved with her.
He wore a gray uniform with a white band around his upper arm and another around his hair. He was a triplet to General Midnight and General Sunset.
The children in their rows were healthy, their cheeks full, their eyes bright. Baba Yaga inspected them, seeming to correct one here, to compliment one there. One and all, they swelled with satisfaction beneath her gaze.
It was worse than the uniforms. It made me sick to watch her convince the safe, well-fed children of her city that the world was out to destroy them, and that they would have to be brutal and take what they could in order to survive it.
Finally, the tsarytsya turned to Aleksei and asked him a question. I didn’t understand what she said. But Anya’s face paled.
Aleksei’s throat bobbed. He put a hand on the shoulder of one boy and one girl, both probably about eleven, about the same size. Baba Yaga nodded, efficient, and the children emerged into the circle.
I couldn’t stifle a cry when I realized what he’d done.
Aleksei had chosen the children who would fight.
Anya reached for my hand. I seized it, my fingers shaking. Consumed with horror.
I hadn’t believed Aleksei was one of them—not really. But he was. He wasn’t just taking the tsarytsya’s orders; he was issuing his own, adding to the hell that was life for these children, for this miserable gray city.
Grandmother Wolf tipped her head back and howled.
The crowd followed her.
The sound had frightened me when it had been merely the cries of a few guards on the Gray Road. This—the animal screams of a crowd beneath the white moon—turned my heart to water.
And then the children began to fight.
The match was ugly. The boy and the girl fought with a certainty that turned my stomach. But their movements were clumsy, ham-fisted—unchoreographed, nothing like the practice matches above the fjord in Norge.
The Asgard boys had bantered as they sparred, trying to sharpen one another. These children fought to win.
The girl’s fists were so small and the boy’s arms were thin and birdlike and their fight seemed to go on forever, forever, forever.
Finally, the boy caught the girl around the waist and wrestled her to the ground. He pinned one shoulder and punched her in the nose again and again, until blood stained his wrist and she rolled her head to the side so as not to drown in its flow.
The boy kept punching her, striking her in the ear.
I had clung to hope since I had left Potomac. Tried to be brave. But watching a crowd of men cheer as children beat one another, I wanted to go back to the kitchens. To curl up in the ashes and surrender.
Mostly, I wished for Torden. I wanted to bury my face in his chest and not look at a world that proved itself more brutal at every turn.
When Cobie and Anya had suggested it, I had balked at poisoning Baba Yaga. But watching the brutal spectacle before me, it seemed like justice. I didn’t think I’d stay my hand now, if I had the chance to deal it out.
I wanted to raze her tower, turn the gray uniforms to ash, return every child she’d conscripted to the ones who loved them.
When Baba Yaga locks the door,
Children pass thereby no more.
This city was as foul and dark and decaying as the witch’s house in the nursery rhyme. For the first time, it did not feel enough to put this ruthless empire at my back.
The girl’s head snapped back a final time, and the boy stood. Blood spattered his face and his knuckles.
Baba Yaga loped forward and lifted his hand high, calling something out in her low, rasping voice, and the crowd howled again. Fury and repulsion roiled through me. I was afraid my bowels would loose themselves of their own accord.
“Selah, the girl’s still breathing,” Anya whispered. “She’s getting up.”
“Thank God.” I swallowed hard. “Anya, we have to get to Cobie. We need to talk to her before—”
Anya nodded sharply. She put a hand on Ivan’s arm, let her voice grow high and frightened as she pointed to Cobie. I grimaced and looked away, searching the mob for anyone—any single face—who didn’t approve of this butchery.
My gaze lit on a cluster of women near the back of the crowd. At least twenty of them stood together, some in finery, some ragged, their skin of every color from pale white to deep brown. They were mostly in their twenties and thirties.
I wasn’t a mother, but I’d had one, for a brief, blessed time. And I remembered the way she’d looked at me.
The women were watching the little pestykk with hunger in their eyes—a mother’s hunger. A mother’s fear for the children, still in their parade lines, being groomed into monsters. And a mother’s rage toward those guilty. Toward the tsarytsya, and Aleksei.
He looked like a ghost beside Baba Yaga. She was fierce and alive and bloodthirsty, and Aleksei looked a mere shade away from disappearing altogether.
One of the women met my eyes, her starving gaze so intense that I stepped back, tripped, and fell. The stones of the courtyard sliced at my hands. Someone trod on my leg.
“Selah!” Anya crouched beside me, calling up to Ivan.
I didn’t want him to touch me. But as Ivan helped me rise, blood seeping from my palms, I let the tears I wanted to cry fill my eyes.
I held out my bleeding hands to Ivan and his soldier friends and wailed like a child.
Anya clung to Ivan’s bicep, pleading with him and pointing to Cobie. Ivan scrubbed a hand over his peach fuzz and sighed, finally conceding.
While his friends rolled their eyes, annoyed at my whimpering, Anya and I exchanged a sharp, victorious glance. “Got him,” I murmured, still sniffling, as Ivan shouldered his way through the crowd ahead of us.
When we reached Cobie’s side, Anya seized her arm with no warning. “I can still take your place.”
Cobie shook her head. “No. I’m—I’m ready.” She glanced down at my hands. “Selah, what happened?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said, dismissing my bleeding palms.
Anya and Cobie swapped a significant look. “You should go inside and clean up,” Anya said.
“What—no!” I blurted to Cobie. “I have to stay, you could be called any minute—”
“And I don’t want you to watch,” Cobie broke in. Her dark hair shone in the moonlight.
I drew back a little, wounded. “You don’t want me here?”
Cobie glanced between Anya and me. “I don’t want either of you here. But especially not you.”
I scoffed, fighting to h
ide my hurt. “But Anya’s all right?” It felt petty, at a time like this. But I was stung nonetheless.
“Anya’s better with this than you are,” Cobie said quietly, putting her small tanned hand on my shoulder. She swallowed. “I don’t want you to look at me differently after this.”
“I wouldn’t!”
“You might,” Cobie said. “I’m going to do what I have to do not to die, and—you might change your mind about me.”
“I would never,” I said, vehement. “You know I would never, Cobie.”
Anya drew Cobie and me close, pretending to hug us. “The castle is empty, Selah,” she whispered. “And Baba Yaga and most of her guards are outside. Don’t waste this chance.” She darted her eyes at the top of the tower, to the room where Baba Yaga slept. I straightened, my eyes widening.
The radio.
“Are you certain?” I took Cobie by the arms. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“Go, Selah. This is Wolf territory. I don’t want you to watch me fight them off.” Cobie’s throat tightened. “Because when I fight, I don’t lose. And winning is an ugly business.”
43
Fear hammered at my heart as I left Cobie behind.
It felt like yet another betrayal that would sit on my conscience—to abandon her to the howling Wolves outside. But this chance might never come again.
The tower was quiet as a tomb after the rage of the crowd in the courtyard. I raced into the kitchen to clean and bandage my cuts, to wipe away all the blood on my hands.
It would not do to leave any trace of my presence behind.
Then I gathered up a basket of rags and soap and made for the stairs.
For once, the way was clear. The steps creaked beneath me as I climbed, trying to look bored, like I was going about my business. One story after another passed me by, until I came to her door.
I’d seen a few guards here and there, most looking as if they were on their way to the toilet or to bed after overindulging, and I’d expected to meet at least one outside Baba Yaga’s bedroom door. But there was no one. The hall was empty. And there was no one to stop me from pushing into her room and striding toward the radio.
